Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson,...

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, by Robert Polito (Vintage, $16).

"Like Marlon Brando slipping into Stanley Kowalski, biographer Robert Polito slips like a cat into the tall, courtly figure of pulp novelist-screenwriter Jim Thompson and delivers a cellular portrait of a hard-driving alcoholic writer largely remembered today for films that often fall far below the power of the novels they spring from," reviewer Donald Newlove wrote in the Tribune in January. Only "two strong films have been based on Thompson's work--Stephen Frears' version of `The Grifters' and Bertrand Tavernier's `Clean Slate' (or `Coup de Torchon,' taken from Thompson's `Pop. 1280')." But even those two were softened from Thompson's grisly originals.

"Alcoholic writers often make for gripping biography, and Jim Thompson is no exception," Newlove wrote. "Polito, who edited `Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson' (1988), fully explores his subject's life while rendering a deep view of the works. He devotes much space to quoting friends and family members whom he interviewed or who wrote to him at length, and to analyzing many inventively well-written and psychologically striking passages from Thompson's novels that still stand up strongly and whet the reader's appetite for more."

Truly amazing, Polito points out, is that "Thompson's massive midlife output of crime fiction, including the 12 paperback thrillers on which his reputation is based, was written in less than two years (1952-1954), although it took several more years for them all to . . . see print."

Polito follows Thompson through this burst of the "most furiously dark American fiction ever seen" to his slide back to semiobscurity working piecemeal on failure after failure.